


education and catastrophe

by thermodynamicActivity (chlorinetrifluoride)



Series: The Collegestuck 'Verse [16]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Teachers, Gen, Humanstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-21
Updated: 2017-06-21
Packaged: 2018-11-16 23:31:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11263293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chlorinetrifluoride/pseuds/thermodynamicActivity
Summary: Contrary to popular belief, you are not always trying to be the biggest asshole in the faculty directory. Your name is Simon Cao, and you teach Physics.You try not to care about your students, because the real world won't care about them, and that's what you're supposed to be preparing them for? Right?Once in a while, you'll make an exception.Here is your first exception.





	education and catastrophe

**Author's Note:**

> so i decided to write simon not being a jerk  
> or  
> being less of one than usual

**"We are in a race between education and catastrophe."**  
\- Janet Jackson

* * *

 

_**Fall 2005 - Simon Cao** _

The first few years you teach, you manage not to befriend any of your students, in stark contrast to Krishna, who has become a glorified guidance counselor, despite teaching history and having many classes. He’s the most popular teacher in the History department. This, in stark contrast to you. You’ve heard students whisper in the hallways about what a hardass you are. Let them whisper, you don’t give a shit.

Okay, part of you may give a shit. You have become the exact sort of teacher whose classes you ditched with the most frequency in high school, the ones you _knew_ couldn't be bothered to learn much more than your name on the attendance sheet. The "TA" in your pesterchum handle might as well stand for That Asshole. You think Katya's made that joke before.

It's not that you want to be mean to or hard on your students. You just know that coddling them and being solicitous isn't going to do them many favors in the future. The world is unkind. The system is unkind. They may as well get it through their heads sooner, rather than later. High school teachers may have the latitude, time, and inclination to give a shit about your hopes and dreams, but college professors don't. And all of your students are college-bound.

They should know the lay of the land before they get there.

Krishna calls you on your wall of apathy, accuses you of not caring about any of your students as he pours you a cup of coffee. You two sit across from each other at a table in the faculty cafeteria, a stack of papers between you.

“At least I’m not a bleeding-heart dipshit who gives out stickers for no reason.”

He does. Anytime one of the kids in his classes scores above a 90 on an exam, he puts a little yellow smiling sticker on the upper right corner of the test paper. It irks the shit out of you, almost as much as his self-righteousness.

“That you are not, Simon,” he says.

The real world isn’t going to give a shit about these kids, and that’s what high school is, preparation for college, for the real world, where people chew you up and spit you out. No stickers there. No uncomfortable conversations with students who concern you.

However, underneath the indifference lies an unsettling belief: that these kids deserve more than they’re given. This is what happens when you live with Krishna for too many years.

You don’t care, you swear it. These students are just names and numbers. That's all they're going to be.

Then, Fall 2005 comes, with a brand new set of overachievers in your honors Physics class.

You try to use the same combination of apathy and antipathy that has served you for the last two years, but some of these students breach your defenses, particularly the boy in the front, with the skateboard and the ridiculous hair. How does he see through it? Hair obscuring his eyes, he grins up at you with the most fucked up set of teeth you’ve seen outside of your bathroom mirror.

That’s not the only student who gives you deja vu.

Beside him, stupid hair motherfucker’s girlfriend swears en Español whenever she can’t figure out a question with an alacrity that reminds you of the second most obnoxious woman you’ve ever dated. You just _have to_ find out what Marisol thinks of this girl.

Meanwhile, the girl behind her answers with a measured dignity that causes you to think of your best friend’s mother. Except your best friend’s mother doesn’t have facial piercings. Still, you wonder whether or not a conversation between her and Dolo sounds like a monologue.

All the way in the back sit ~~(a woman and a man)~~ a girl and a boy that suck the air from your lungs if you focus on them. It’s not hard to pin down why the girl unsettles you. You get a refresher course pretty much every time she opens her mouth.

_“Whale, I think the vector sum would be…”_

You contemplate threatening her with detention whenever she makes a fish pun.

You think it might be good for your sanity if you do.

The boy’s simple enough, mostly unable to speak. But he reminds you of someone you knew once.

A lifetime ago.

Not long enough ago.

You never do call on Meenah Peixes or Kurloz Makara. Not like the latter would answer even if you did. He doesn’t do anything in class except stare at the board.

Two weeks pass.

You plan to suspend stupid hair fuck for continuously showing up to your class stoned, but one fine September afternoon - when you’d taken one look at him and figured he’d fallen asleep - he takes issue with the calculations on the blackboard.

“Nah, son, chill. Acceleration should be 289.73 m/s^2.” he says.

You resist the urge to shoot him a withering glare, and manage to keep your tone calm and even. “How exactly did you come to that answer, Mister…” You scour the attendance sheet, too annoyed to remember his name at present. “Mister Captor?”

“Yeah, that’s me.”

You don't know why you dislike with such unmitigated vitriol. That's a lie. You know exactly why. You've looked over his homework as you graded it, and you've seen what he's able to do when he actually uses his brain. He's capable of a lot more than skateboarding in the courtyard, shouting at people in the hallways, living in detention, and smoking enough weed to kill Bob Marley.

Now, you're not Krishna Vandayar. You're not that guy.

You're not going to pull him aside and tell him exactly how much potential he has, even if you want to. If he can't figure it out, that's his problem, not yours. His flippancy just pisses you off. He goes to one of the best math and science schools in the city and his favorite thing to do is goof off? Fuck. A finite number of students are accepted into this school. He could have saved a seat for someone who actually intended to properly make use of it.

(Maybe he's like how you were, and he genuinely doesn't know what he can do.

So what, though? You're his physics teacher, not his guidance counselor.

Maybe - if you're feeling really generous - in between grading and conferences and all the other bullshit, you'll tell Dolo to give him the "you have way more ability than you seem to act like" talk, assuming she hasn't given him that talk already.

Who even knows?)

Either way, you are now singlemindedly focused on this kid. You toss him your whiteboard marker - it misses, he has to pick it up - and invite him up to the board, so he can show you exactly how he arrived at his conclusion. When this pothead either makes a fool out of himself, or surprises the hell out of you, you want him to be center stage.

“You’re up.”

He quivers, standing before you.

He should be afraid. _(Should he?)_

After his girlfriend shoots him the thumbs up, he seems to regain confidence, and starts writing calculations beside yours.

“Anyway, I took the deriv of the displacement function, bro.” Did he seriously use “bro” to refer to you? “Then I took the deriv of that, which would be accel–”

“I know what acceleration is,” you tell him through gritted teeth.

“Okay, yeah, of course,” he replies, not facing you and continuing to scrawl values, marker screeching against the board in his haste. You see a “d^2s/dt^2” go by and suppress the urge to laugh. “Anyway, I plugged in the displacement into the next equation, and I got 289.7262 m/s^2, rounded to 289.73 for significant figures.”

Well, then. Color you surprised.

You run through his method, get the same answer, and mentally repeat your own, ending up with a value close to his this time around. You glance through your notes and realize you made a typo in your lesson plan. Then you scowl, angry at yourself for the mistake. Mituna takes two steps back. You assure him that you are not angry at _him._

Dolo’s clone gazes between you and stupid hair fuck with concern, her hand raised as if she has something tentative to add. Although she has a 98 in your class so far, one glance at her confusion tells you that she has no idea how her friend got his answer.

Time to give credit where credit is due.

“Mituna's correct. Excellent work,” you say, accepting your marker back. You can't resist one small jibe. “Though I don’t remember telling any of you to use Calculus for this.”

Mituna grins like he expected this argument. “You didn’t, but my way is quicker.”

“Not to a class that hasn’t taken anything more difficult than Trigonometry.”

“Oh yeah,” he says slowly, confidence blown in an instant. “Yeah, you’re right. I’m sorry.”

His sorry comes out more like “thorry”, fucked up in the same way all his sibilants have been, and an wave of protectiveness for the twitchy kid in front of the board hits you square in the face.

“Don’t worry, Mituna. It’s good that someone had the correction,” you assure him.

(You're going to tell Krishna about this when you get home, he's going to give you a stupid smirk and accuse you of the crime of giving a damn, and you're going to fill up a cup with ice and dump it down his pants. Allegedly, you are a responsible adult. Not where he's concerned, though.)

You start thinking of Mituna more fondly the day he stays after class to ask you about implicit differentiation.

A day later, you give him the textbooks you used when you took Calculus 1, 2, and 3 nearly ten years ago.

"Good luck. Review chain rule for trig functions and you’ll be golden,” went your message, jotted down on a folded sheet of graph paper, and slipped into the Calculus 1 textbook.

He continues to stay late to talk to you about parametric functions, and whatever else crosses his mind.

Although you don't tell Krishna, about any of this, he somehow manages to find out. You suspect espionage. Five foot ten espionage in an olive green jacket, who can somehow quietly make her way anywhere without being noticed.

"Here I thought I was the bleeding-heart dipshit," he quips.

"I'm just giving him extra things to study. Apparently, when he's not bored out of his mind, he shows up for my class on time, non-disruptive, and not stoned."

"Oh, so that's it, then?"

"That's it."

Time passes.

One October afternoon, Mituna's staying late to help you put away the kinematics carts from Physics lab. He is cheerfully relating to you some breakthrough he had in terms of understanding integration by parts. His hands give one wobbly shake, the small cart falls out of his hands, and onto the tile floor below. One of the wheels pops off.

"Fuck! I'm such a fucking clumsy ass fucki--"

He has chorea. Why didn't you notice that?

There are very few reasons why a teenager would have that sort of condition. You'd noticed when you gave him the marker at the whiteboard that his hands had fine tremors.

That narrows things down to neurodegenerative disease (unlikely), or medication side effects (more likely). You'd like to know which, and you're not asking Dolo.

"It's alright, Mituna. We have like four hundred and twenty of those in the stockroom," you say.

He's so angry at himself that he doesn't even parse the joke.

"Still, I mean, if--"

You raise your hands out in front of you, parallel to the floor, so he can see that they shake as well.

"It happens," you tell him.

He blinks at you, and does not say a word for a while.

Then he gives you a smile.

"Okay, sir," he says.

Neither of you speak as you dismantle the last of the Physics lab apparatus. You decide to ask him a question, apropos of nothing much.

"Have you ever thought about what you wanted to do after high school?"

"Well, Mr. V asked all of us that, first day of class. I told him I wanted to be a professional video game player," he says.

You roll your eyes.

"Be serious."

"I, uh, don't fuckin' know? My family is kind of broke. I don't even know _if_ I'm going to college at this rate."

"Pretend you had no financial constraints. What would you study?"

He thinks for a good two minutes.

"Engineering, maybe. I was on robotics in freshman and sophomore year. Then, family stuff came up."

"Cooper Union's School of Engineering is free, if you get accepted," you tell him.

He gives you a "you have to be fucking shitting me" look.

"Mad respect, man, but _Cooper Union?_ Do I look like I'm smart enough for that shit?"

You half smile and half snort.

"Actually, you do. What's your average?"

"Ninety-something. Ninety-three?"

"Have you taken the SAT yet?"

"Nope."

"If you score high, and get good letters of recommendation, you could probably get in," you tell him, emphasizing the second thing, because you might be willing to write one for him, if he keeps taking your class seriously. "Just something to consider."

He goes silent for a while, once again.

"I'll think about it," he says, finally. "G'night, Mr. C."

Well.

That's probably as good as you're going to get.

If Krishna finds out about this conversation, you'll never hear the end of it.

You sigh.

No one in your class says anything when you start acting more civil and slightly - slightly, mind you - more lenient toward them after that.

But you do.

You hate when the dipshit in room 305 gets through to you, but he didn't. Not this time.

A student did.


End file.
